Thursday, March 3, 2016

Selling Baby Parts

House Panel investigates the truth about research on baby body parts

While
one corner of Washington, DC was focused on the Supreme Court and its
first major abortion case in years, not far down the road, the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives was hearing its own abortion-related arguments.
The Panel was formed as a result of last summer’s Planned Parenthood
exposé videos from the Center for Medical Progress. These videos
revealed a market for the buying and selling of the parts of aborted
babies. Chaired by Marsha Blackburn (R-TN),
the Panel is currently investigating the practice of procuring fetal
body parts and the bioethical implications. An initial press release on
the hearings noted, “It is the purpose of the Select Investigative Panel
to follow the facts to find out ‘what is going on?’ but it is also our
responsibility to ask ‘what does it mean?’”
As the Panel’s first hearing opened Wednesday morning, Chairwoman Marsha Blackburn
welcomed the witnesses, noting that in this era, we have to tackle new
issues of bioethics as each week brings a new medical advance. In part,
she said:

Ours is not the first era to face such
questions. The Nuremburg Code produced a human rights based ethics
statement after horrible information was revealed about experimenting on
humans without their permission. We learned, years after it was
underway, about prisoners in China forced to donate organs or killed for
their organs. We learned about the horrors of forced abortion and
testing drugs on the poor and unaware, after it happened. We all
remember the horrible reports about the syphilis studies on African
Americas or forced sterilization of the mentally challenged, years or
even decades after it happened.

Last summer’s videos revealed that
something very troubling that is going on related to fetal tissue and
research. The weak, the vulnerable, those with no voice – harvested and
sold – there is something going on, something that deserves
investigating and that demands our best moral and ethical thinking.

As the hearing continued, several members made comments and asked the
witnesses questions. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) focused on the consent form
process for fetal donations. She read one consent form, used by an
abortion facility, that says, in part:

Research using the blood from pregnant
women and tissue that has been aborted has been used to treat and find a
cure for such diseases as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s
disease, cancer, and AIDS.

Hartzler noted that no cure has actually been found for these
diseases. She questioned whether the consent form was complying with
guidelines from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Those guidelines
are comprehensive, and, as HHS points out: “Informed consent is a
process, not just a form.” Thus, Hartzler was questioning the
comprehensiveness of the “informed consent” used by abortion facilities,
as well as the ethical considerations in the Belmont Report. This report is the standard for all research involving human subjects, and it is required for anyone undergoing such research.
Some Panel members asserted that the statement that fetal tissue has
helped “find cures” is incorrect and could also be coercive in obtaining
consent for baby body part donation from the mother. A woman might be
more likely to consent to donation if she believed cures have already
been found. However, the reality she should be told is that all
donations are used and experimented with in a lab, but no cures have yet
been created with baby body parts.
Paige Comstock Cunningham, J.D., Executive Director, The Center for
Bioethics and Human Dignity testified at the hearing. She noted several
points that explain the bioethical trouble with fetal tissue donations:

The fetus is a human subject entitled to the protections
that both traditional and modern codes of medical ethics provide to
human subjects.

Even if it were morally permissible for a woman seeking
abortion to donate fetal remains for research, we question whether the
process for obtaining such consent meets current norms for obtaining
informed consent.

There is yet another reason to oppose the current practices of fetal tissue research: it is unnecessary.

It needs to be made clear that no current
medical treatments exist that have required using fetal tissues for
their discovery or development…there has never been a scientific reason
requiring fetal cell lines for vaccine development…

Adult stem cells have already been used
for the development of new treatments, have been proven in clinical
trials, and resulted in the formation of new companies that have
successfully brought to market treatments that are routinely benefiting
patients today.

(Read Schmainda’s entire witness statement here.)
Further questions revealed some troubling answers. Rep. Sean
Duffy (R-WI) asked R. Alta Charo, J.D. , a professor of law and
bioethics, University of Wisconsin at Madison, about the need for human
fetal tissue to be used for such purposes as flavor enhancers or
cosmetics. Charo’s callous reply to the flavor question was that using
fetuses for testing sense of taste “can be a valid use because loss of
taste can be devastating neurologically.” Charo neglected to note that a
baby’s own personal neurological system is devastated through abortion
and fetal harvesting, and all for the inhumane purpose of seeing if
something tastes good enough.
(Read Charo’s witness statement here.)
Charo and Lawrence S.B. Goldstein, PhD, a professor in the Department
of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San
Diego School of Medicine, were the two “minority witnesses” supporting
fetal tissue research. Goldstein works directly as a researcher in this
field, and the Center for Medical Progress issued a comment today ahead
of his testimony, noting:

This is more of the same from
Planned Parenthood and their political cronies: a total lack of
transparency and false advertising to cover up troubling revelations
about their baby-parts-for-profit scheme. In reality, Planned
Parenthood’s taxpayer-funded crime syndicate for baby parts harvesting
is on full display in this hearing – a taxpayer-funded researcher at a
government school harvesting brains from late-term babies at a
state-subsidized Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.
The Investigative Panel must ask Dr. Goldstein the hard questions
about how much money he gave Planned Parenthood in exchange for aborted
babies’ brains, and what Planned Parenthood may have done to their
abortion process to accommodate his orders.

Goldstein staunchly defended his work, and while he asserted that he followed the law, he also revealed to Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-IN): “I am uncomfortable with the law of the land.”
Goldstein admitted there is a financial side to fetal tissue
donation, but he deflected all questions that asked for specific details
on how fetal research was going to help when there have been no cures
after years of research. He commented that since researchers are not
sure which part of the brain is being affected by a certain disease, it
is important to “explore the landscape.” In essence, he argued that it
is necessary to play around with the entire brain of various dead babies
so we can maybe one day find an answer, even though there is no
guarantee research will ever find it, and certainly not in fetal brains.
All Goldstein could offer was, “We’re going to give it a good solid
try.”

But Rep. Andy Harris (R- MD)
noted that the process has already been slowed down because of the
necessary IRB process. Researchers who use human subjects are not only
subject to the aforementioned Belmont Report for ethics in research, but
they must also submit their studies to an institutional review board,
or IRB, before being allowed to proceed with their research. Harris
pointed out that the IRB process can take six months, or even longer.
Thus, he argued, the process is already slow, but this is
necessary because it allows patients their protection – which is more
important than speed. No research study that involves humans can proceed
without IRB approval. This was one of the controversies with the Planned Parenthood videos,
as PP executives Dr. Deborah Nucatola and Mary Gatter both complained
about the slow IRB process, and Nucatola commented on ways Planned
Parenthood gets around needing an IRB.

Toward the close of the hearing, Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) commented it
was “ironic” that they were talking about how to save children from
diseases through fetal tissue research at the same time they were
talking about how “we can dissect them and use their aborted baby
parts.”